Building a new totalitarian regime

MOSCOW – A law on unwanted foreign organizations has been enacted in Russia. The title speaks for itself, meaning we’ll deal with them the way we see fit. No court hearings, even such “fair” trials as practiced in this country. All it takes is a decision of a public prosecutor’s office. Politically everything is clear and the new law is also good for [Russian] business: should a foreign company prove too competitive, it could easily be accused of endangering Russia’s economic security.

The new law is one of many steps that are being taken on the road to totalitarianism, even if many a Russian still regard it as total control over all aspects of life on the part of the state. In reality, the state – if one considers the positive meaning of the word – suffers from it in the first place. The most important functions of the state degenerate – as evidenced by today’s Russia. Totalitarianism does not mean nationalization of all aspects of life but destruction of a democratic, modern European state. Let me offer you several Russian examples:

• Cheka-NKVD-KGB[-FSB] remains a punitive and myth-making body devised to invent and produce monsters, villains, demons, and then punish them.

• The army as a mechanism for the initiation, leveling out of the individual, reducing him to forced labor. Today this is true of the conscripts, but even the contract soldiers, those fighting the proxy war [in Ukraine], can hardly be described as an army.

• Education system designed to prevent the emergence of well-educated individuals (as was the case with the [Bolshevik] illiteracy eradication program in conditions of total censorship).

• Health care, a system kept on red alert to rid society of worthless groups. We are heading there as a bill on euthanasia was worked out in detail back in 2007.

• Militia/police and other law-enforcement agencies keep working hand in glove with the underworld.

•  Law courts: nothing much to add here except that they served to add to the slave labor pool previously and are now aiding and abetting business hostile takeovers and political terror.

I could go on and on. Hannah Arendt, however, came up with the key formula: totalitarianism destroys the state as a representative of the interests of all social groups. Note: all such groups! I would add that this is done by way of consensus and that such consensus leads one to the conclusion that it would be absolutely wrong to reduce totalitarianism to destruction, period. Destruction/demolition usually boils down to the clearing of an area as a site for a new construction project. This kind of destruction does not spell no culture but a different kind of culture, a different set of morals, a different kind of spirituality.

Tagging Putinism as a period of stagnation would be grossly misleading because, in reality, everything is the other way around. Putin is taking his Russia back not to the Brezhnev advanced totalitarian regime, but to Stalin with his early, markedly dynamic phase of totalitarianism. Stagnation is where progress is prohibited or has stopped for reasons of its own. Here we see constant change and innovation, in legislation, redistribution of property, and personnel policy. The Russian equivalent of stagnation, zastoi, was coined under Gorbachev. This coinage leaves much to be desired, considering that [Soviet] society was evolving under Brezhnev, paving the way for and actually begetting the perestroika campaign. This is something Putin, like Stalin, will never allow to happen.

There are different aspects to the notion of complicity. One has to figure it out by closely following news bulletins. Here is an example. There are moans and groans about the families of Russian servicemen killed in action or taken prisoners of war in Ukraine. Instead of moaning and groaning, one ought to use one’s head.

They start recalling air deliveries of zinc coffins with Soviet soldiers killed in the Afghan war and how this was gradually shaping antiwar moods. However, those were conscripts who would never be bothered after the second Chechen war. Those in the battlefield [in Ukraine] are professional killers, including a large number of sociopaths, characters without families of their own and with severed next-of-kin ties. This means that there will be no public outburst over their deaths.

Those with families, husbands rather the sons, have a variety of male statuses. Here the old Russian saying that an ex-wife will find another man but an ex-mother will never find another son doesn’t work. For those mothers shown on television their sons are “footloose” after taking up that profession.

We are witness to a certain kind of social process forming a new professional killer caste. And I mean killers, not warriors. These individuals are not trained to defend their Fatherland, facing a matching adversary, but to fight a guerilla war, wearing combat fatigues without insignia, without dog tags lest they be traced to their home country where they swore allegiance as officers and men of its armed forces.

This caste is made up of professional villains and their families cultivate a miscreant lifestyle. These pros won’t think twice when ordered to do in Russia what they’ve done in a country next door to their homeland. There is no Putin’s Russia, there is Russia’s Putin. There are no soldiers abandoned by their Fatherland, there are professional killers who know full well that their Fatherland will disown them, if and when. These individuals were trained and brainwashed into accepting this eventuality as the norm. Such is the attitude [of those “upstairs” in Russia] to them and to the rest of the population. In fact, no one will complain because this is part of Russia’s totalitarian consensus.

They [i.e., those “upstairs”] have found the only right kind of spiritual tie. I wouldn’t even describe it as hatred of Ukraine. Rather, turning Ukraine into an antiworld subject to destruction. There is nothing else uniting the Russkies at the moment. There is no other objective.

Destruction it is, no use trying to deceive oneself. Russkies are obsessed with the idea of a final solution to the Ukrainian question the Endloesung way. This is a popular, massive, unflagging effort. In fact, Moscow Patriarch Kirill contributed to the evil cause when he declared that the ideology of today’s Ukraine was godless. If one juxtaposes this statement with that of Vladimir Yakunin (an outspoken ideologue of Russia’s current regime) about the Russian Orthodox civilization, an overall picture of Europe’s godlessness will be complete. Considering that Ukraine is in its center, the war against it turns into a Russian crusade.

All this is part of a cultural process that may well be described as one of paganizing Russia. A chapter, entitled something like “Today’s Russia Turning into a Pagan Country,” should be added to Ukrainian-Russian Dmitry Pospielovsky’s fundamental work on Christianity and Totalitarianism.

This process should by no means be attributed to the wheelings and dealings of Orthodox Cheka-minded ideologues (one must give Yakunin his due for offering a moderate rather than isolationist Cheka approach), considering that society at times finds itself involved in it acting in a bona fide manner. Much has been said about the “Immortal Regiment” and less about Project Immortal Barracks (the latter makes sense only in the context of public cooperation in the post-Soviet and post-socialist-camp countries). However, the main point was never made. This is also part of the paganization program, even if for the best of intentions. I mean the revival of the ancestor cult in a form reminiscent of ancient Rome.

Therefore, the kind of totalitarianism in today’s Russia is closer to the Nazi model than the Italian aesthetic, racially nonaggressive and Catholic loyal fascist one. The Nazis were hostile to Christianity and obsessed with dominating the world, including genocide and, quite naturally, suicide. Russia is stepping into an epoch of necrophilia and thanatophilia. Hence the killer, latter-day-assassin caste.

Rapprochement with the Nazi model can be detected on the upper echelons of power. A recent bill, still under consideration, bans any parallels between the Soviet and the Nazi regime. So far this concerns past realities, but current realities are crying for just such parallels.

This closeness to Nazism is found in a variety of charitable and otherwise praiseworthy projects. An interview with actress Chulpan Khamatova made headlines after she declared that she was not ashamed of acting in a Putin campaign commercial because it had helped open a child cancer hospital.

One can only wonder about a political system in which one has to publicly support the head of state to help treat cancer-stricken children. Judging by what Khamatova had to say, Putin must have taken those children hostage to make those willing to help those children comply with the terrorist’s demands. You play in the commercial, you get the hospital. You don’t, the kids die.

Khamatova and others who obey such requirements serve to form a Union of the Humiliated whose members keep their humiliation from themselves. This is social psychology ABC: victims of violence, rape, abandonment form alliances among themselves. The necessity of such actions is concealed. This is done using professionally directed soap-opera-like talk shows highlighting human virtues, sincerity, the works. This makes such humiliated unions a major component, bearing structure of totalitarianism.

There was an organization in Nazi Germany known as Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV), meaning “National Socialist People’s Welfare.” It was powerful and did not receive a single Reichspfennig from the Third Reich. It took care of children and mothers. Its members were devout servants of the Fuehrer but the organization never made any deals with Hitler. Moreover, beginning in 1940, the state tasked NSV with the evacuation of children.

Russia’s progressive intelligentsia is content with the primitive assumption that certain activities do not involve the state directly; that this suffices to describe them as part of the construction of a civil society. Some such intellectuals even refer to them as changes to the existing [political] system. Meanwhile, totalitarianism helps those “upstairs” rid themselves of many functions inherent in a democratic and social political system, placing the burden on the shoulders of organizations such as NSV or the Podari zhyzn (Gift of Life) Foundation, of which Khamatova is a member. This doesn’t help make Russian society a civil one while enhancing the totalitarian regime. How can you accuse all those well-wishing kind-hearted intellectuals of helping the construction of a totalitarian regime? They would be aghast. What totalitarian regime? All this will be over soon. Well, several years from now at worst.

Then comes the lifelong routine of daily hatred, deaths, lies, baseness, with no hopes for a better morrow, with everything being the way it was in the cannibalistic and vegetarian days. How will all those daydreamers accept such realities? People still refuse to see what’s happening as part of routine. They still believe this is something out of the ordinary, a chance occurrence, a temporary retreat from the normal.

Sad but true: this is routine. Something you have to face each day – as usual.

Dmitry Shusharin is a Moscow-based historian and political journalist